I haven't seen the original, but consistent with the movie's title and true to Hollywood's typical ways, women in "Brothers" get completely shafted. Portman's character, Grace, the loving and beautiful young military wife, is given almost nothing to work with, though she is present in nearly every [stateside] scene. Like her husband's stepmother, Elsie, played by Mare Winningham, Grace is the portrait of virtue-- innocent of the crime her husband accuses her of (she apparently only kissed Tommy, his brother), paralyzed with empathy when her husband goes ballistic with rage and violence, and always, despite her pain, the perfect mother to her two little girls. Her grief, when she thinks her husband is dead, is dignified and restrained--she smells her husband's clothes, weeps while watching old videos of their family, cannot bring herself to read his last letter to her. Nowhere do we get anger, desperation, grief, resentment, darkness. And when he comes back, a shadowy and skeletal version of his former self, clearly traumatized and haunted, a powder keg about to explode, there is no whiff of fear in Grace. Somehow we are supposed to believe that she has complete faith in his eventual rehabilitation.
What about the first night her husband is back? What a landmine a scene of that first intimacy between the reunited couple would have been-- the director, of course, doesn't bother trying to figure out how that would have played out. Instead, Portman leans her head against Maguire's bruised and scarred back in the bathroom--quiet, noble, loving, and then he rejects her.
The only female in the film whose character is delineated with any psychological believability is Isabelle, the older daughter. And the child actor, Bailee Madison, performs every one of her scenes with pitch-perfect brilliance. She, unlike her mother, registers fear, resentment, jealousy, ugliness. When her father is deployed at the beginning of the film for yet another tour of duty, she tries to stonewall him with a cold shoulder. When he is reported dead (plot improbability), she refuses to put her dress on for his funeral. Grief is selfish, so is pain, and one's understanding or misunderstanding of the cruelty of life's misfortunes can only be seen through a personal lens--this affects
me, my life; her character's the only one who seems to get that. In the scene at her sister's birthday party, Isabelle acts out by grabbing her sister Maggie's presents from her. In part displacing her resentment toward her father with jealousy for her sister's happiness, she shouts at him, "I didn't get anything I wanted for my birthday, and you were in stupid Afghanistan." When both her parents scold her for the remark and then continue to ignore her bad behavior, she begins stewing and then playing with a balloon by rubbing its sides so that it squeaks. Her public suffering is searing; you can't take your eyes off of her any more than the adults at the table can pay attention to her. It is Medusian.
To my mind, then, it is Isabelle that encapsulates the fallout of war; her father's transformation from good to evil, to speak of his character in terms of Greek tragedy, is mirrored in her fall from innocence. These changes are irrevocable; trauma, though it can be healed to some degree, leaves an indelible impression. We become what we are because of what happens to us, and like her father, Isabelle has no choice about how she has been changed.
Labels: film
